Apple Gets Tough With Pricing, New 24-inch iMac.

Our favorite Mac maker continues to find ways to surprise the Kool-Aid faithful and everyone else with a broken crystal ball.

What’s new? Aggressive pricing on Mac mini, the low end iMac, and a new 24-inch display. What’s left for next week?

Just when you thought Apple was being selfish and not paying attention to the low end market, Bang! New low prices on the hot selling iMac.

Just when you thought Apple was ready to drop a new big screen iMac during a Special Event, Bang! Quiet introduction of a bigger than expected iMac.

What’s left for the Special Event next week? Let everyone retune their crystal balls (so to speak, not that there’s anything wrong with that, add your snicker here...).

On top of that, Apple also upped the specifications on the very low end Mac mini, making it a screamer to match the high end.

First, the iMacs. Check the Apple Store for details. Drool your way over to the high end and the low end.

The high end is a 24-inch beauty that helps fill the product gap between the iMac and Mac Pro line. Gap? Yep.

Mac360’s Polish Princess of Chicago, NoodleMac Nowak, figured it out last week.

You’ll get 1920 x 1200 screen resolution, a 250 gigabyte hard drive, Bluetooth, Airport Extreme, a SuperDrive, and the new Intel “Merom” Core 2 Duo processor from Intel.

All this new and cool and drool is available barely six months after the first slower, aging, antiquish iMacs debuted with Intel Inside.

The low end is a crippled 17-inch iMac for $999. Resolution is a mere 1440 x 900, the processor is the sluggish 1.83ghz Core 2 Duo from Intel, a dinky 160 gigabyte hard drive, and no SuperDrive.

There’s Airport Extreme but no Bluetooth and no dedicated graphics card (feast your game playing eyes on the Intel GMA 950 with 64megs of shared memory.

The high end iMac has a gigabyte of RAM and half that for the low end iMac at half the price. That seems fair.

Apple’s getting tough with pricing at the low end and filling the void between consumer desktop and pro models at the high end.

Way to go Apple. Let’s look at market share in the next 12 months. Can you say zooooom!

At the very low, low end of the Mac mini line the price remains the same, but the power increases.

Gone is the Core Sole to be replaced by the 1.66Ghz Intel Core Duo, so the lowest of low end is much faster than before.

The Mac mini goodies remain about the same; a gigabyte of RAM, Bluetooth and Airport Extreme, and a 60-gigabyte SATA hard drive.

All this was dumped on the Kool-Aid Kids without fanfare, personal notification, wild party atmosphere press event, or satellite link.

Steve Jobs didn’t even call the Mac360 troops. It just happened.

Next week we’re supposed to have the super duper, double deluxe, Special Event, right? Now that there’s no longer the iMac Factor™ to worry about, what’s up?

New iPods? New movie downloads from the iTunes Music Store? New Apple iPhone? “One more thing...™?

Hey, that works for me.

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